American Airlines planes sit on the tarmac at Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Jan. 11, 2023. (Seth Wenig / AP Photo)
The Friday-the-13th FAA order to ground all planes nationwide was lifted after four hours, but the damage done continues to cause delays and cancellations of flights as airlines try to make adjustments to schedules.
The grounding order came at around 4 p.m. Eastern with no warning and little explanation.
While Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin assured Americans that the order, only the second since 9/11, was not part of a threat to the nation, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later explained that the telecommunications outages of the U.S. air traffic control system were caused by an overload of an old, analog system, which the FAA is in the process of replacing.
“We systematically, but slowly, brought down 3,500-plus aircraft across the national airspace,” Duffy said during a White House briefing.
Continued Duffy: “We’re going to try to move as many of those [delayed planes] as we can tonight. If not, we’re going to start tomorrow morning with our airline partners, moving those aircraft. But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.”
An estimated 1.5 million people were stranded by the cancellations, according to the data firm Cirium. Flights that were already in the air came in for landing but none took off during the four-hour period.
Duffy emphasized that the incident demonstrated why his request for emergency funding of up to $50 billion to overhaul the aviation network with the latest technology should be approved by Congress.
In fact, the FAA’s new AI-powered program called the SMART system, a tool from Air Space Intelligence that uses AI to monitor air traffic and prevent delays, began to go online this week. The company emphasized after the grounding that its AI product was not to blame for the outage.
Watch Duffy’s press conference:
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[ H/T WorldNetDaily ]
